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It’s the sort of magic act that four or five centuries of colonizers might tell you was impossible: Burying meat to cook seems like a trick, but earth ovens fed islands, marae, and mountain rites. An unlined imu on the Big Island of Hawai‘i filled with salted pig, and then layered with bananas and ti leaves and then sealed with dirt, becomes melting kālua pork as it basks overnight inside stored heat and steam trapped tight by its rocky case. Māori cooks “lay a hāngī", heating stones, stacking baskets of lamb, pork or chicken with kūmara, then earthing the pit so the entire site functions as a subterranean pressure cooker for communal feasts. In the Andes, pre-Hispanic pachamanca — stones of volcanic origin, herb rubbings on meats, tubers, corn, an earthy seal — serves as a communal sacrifice to Pachamama, and turns out smoke-perfumed, fall-apart roasts.
Well before there was refrigeration, cooks made meat don armor in sharp, spicy baths that seasoned, tenderized and slowed spoilage. Verjuice — the sour juice of unripe grapes or crab apples — was a medieval kitchen staple when lemons were scarce; from Le Ménagier de Paris to Tudor cookbooks, the sauce and the meat marinade splash it in. The 14th-century English Forme of Cury stews rabbit or goat in red wine, vinegar, sugar and warming spices, one that not only imbues the meat with flavor but helps it to last that much longer. Between the Islamic world, where vinegar-and-saffron sikbāj is attested in the 13th century, and Europe, where it walked in on the legs of trade as a fully-realized escabeche — cooked meats or fish taken in a wine-vinegar pickle that still softly megaphones medieval pantries.
